At the moment, I want flexible recipes. Meals which are un-precious and can withstand multiple substitutions. I want to cook with the ingredients already in my fridge and pantry and avoid unplanned, energy-sapping, dizzy-making trips to the supermarket. Cooking with what I have helps maintain my equilibrium.

Plus, my repertoire at the moment is relatively small - creative energy and cooking time being in short supply - however I get bored eating the same thing over and over. Flexible recipes mean I can tweak them around, changing small components, so that, while the basic recipe stays the same, the meal is different each time.

All of which makes this recipe for Eggs Poached in a Smoky Paprika Tomato Sauce one of my current favourite dinners. It involves making a speedy smoked paprika and oregano flavoured tomato and spinach sauce. You then poach eggs in the sauce and finish the meal with a scattering of feta and avocado. It’s simple, delicious and balanced.

Plus, apart from washing the spinach, there’s no prep work and, after having cooked this dinner a few times I can now get it done in under 20 minutes.

Perfect for when energy or time are limited.

Poaching eggs in tomato sauce is a technique I’ve used on many occasions - you’ll find a similar recipe, using fresh tomatoes, preserved lemons and lots of herbs in the summer edition of An Honest Kitchen. It’s an easy way to add a good whack of protein to your meal, without dirtying another pan (always important). Plus the egg whites take up some of the flavour of the tomato sauce, which adds to the deliciousness.

Eggs Poached in a Smoky Paprika Tomato Sauce

I simmer the tinned tomatoes vigorously, so they thicken quickly, plus it seems to soften the tinned tomato flavour. Just make sure you stir regularly, to prevent the tomatoes from sticking to the bottom of the pan.

It’s also easy to over-cook the eggs, so watch them carefully and remove from the hot plate when the white is just set. Then serve immediately, while the eggs are freshly cooked.

I've posted some different ways you can adapt this meal, to suit the contents of your pantry and fridge in the notes below the recipe and photos. Serves 2.

What to do:

Make the sauce: Pour the tomatoes into a wide based frying pan or saucepan, with a lid. Place over a medium - high heat. Add the smoked paprika and dried oregano and season with black pepper. Simmer vigorously for 7 - 10 minutes, stirring and mashing the tomatoes regularly to break them up and ensure they don’t stick to the pan. The tomatoes will thicken, become more sauce-like and turn a slightly darker shade of red.

While the sauce is simmering give the English spinach a thorough wash.

Test the sauce: Taste the tomato sauce for flavouring. You may want to add more smoked paprika, oregano or seasoning, depending on your tastebuds.

Add the spinach & finish the sauce: Add the spinach to the pan and cover with a lid or large plate. It will look like way too much spinach and you’ll probably feel you should try to stir the spinach into the tomato sauce. Resist that urge. Just place the lid on top and leave for 2 minutes. Then remove the lid and stir the now wilted spinach into the tomato sauce.

Cook the eggs: Using the back of a spoon, make 4 indents in the tomato sauce. Crack an egg into each indent. Cover and gently simmer for 7 – 10 minutes, until the egg whites are cooked and the yolks still runny.

While the eggs are poaching peel and slice the avocado.

To serve: Remove from the hot plate and crumble the goat cheese over the top. Scatter over the sliced avocado and then season with black pepper and serve immediately.

Simmer the tomatoes vigorously, so they thicken quickly and become more sauce-like

When you add the spinach it will look like way too much. Don't worry.

Cooking Notes

Tomatoes: I tend to use canned whole tomatoes as I think they are sweeter than the chopped variety. However, I have also made this with a pre-made tomato pasta sauce, which cuts down on the cooking time even further. If you’re using pasta sauce then pour the sauce into a wide based pan and start the recipe at the instructions to ‘Add the spinach & finish the sauce’.

Spinach: When fresh spinach is not in season or in my fridge, then frozen spinach works perfectly well. You could also use silverbeet / chard, but I'd recommend blanching this first.

Spices: This meal is delicious made with chermoula, instead of the smoked paprika and oregano. If I feel like some heat, I’ll add in dried chilli flakes.

Avocado & Feta: I almost always have feta in the house, but avocado is sometimes out of season and / or ridiculously expensive. In that instance I’ll scatter over a couple of tablespoons of toasted pepitas or some almonds.

Nutrition Notes

Suitable for ovo- and lacto-ovo- Vegetarians.

Low in FODMAPS.

For a Low Salt meal, replace the feta with almonds.

Feta is generally low in lactose and can be tolerated by many. However, if you are sensitive, then replace the feta with almonds.

Gluten free - although it's worthwhile double-checking the labels on the ingredients you buy.

What's your favourite flexible meal?

My re-start of this blog back in October proved to be bit of a false start.

I was doing too much other work, couldn’t find the right tone, or the time and energy for blogging and was uncertain about where to go.

And then the spammers hit.

The spammers have been relentless and revolting, so my sincere apologies if you’ve visited, looked at the comments and been horrified by what’s there. I know I have been.

Anyway, for various reasons I took the plunge and decided to do something I'd been planning to do for yonks – set up a new website. A website that was more than just a blog, which showed the full gamut of my activities and presented a better showcase for my recipes.

And here it is.

While thinking about and setting up this site, I've taken the 37 Signals approach of “release early and often”. So, while this site is basic and practically none of my blog and recipe archive have been transferred over, I want to celebrate the small victory and push the new site live.

My blog and recipe archive will follow, but in the meantime it feels lovely to have a new look home on the web.

I’ve been testing out some new recipes and have also simplified my working life. Which means I should now have the time, vigor and concentration for blogging.

I’ll also be sending out a newsletter in the next few weeks. Those of you who’ve subscribed in the past will receive a confirmation email first - after all this time it seems presumptuous to just assume you still want to receive the Limes and Lycopene newsletter - just click on the link in the email and you’ll be re-subscribed.

If you haven’t subscribed before, then you can do so via Mailchimp, by clicking here.

My plan is to be active here, putting up a post about once a fortnight, so I’ll talk to you soon.

I used to be a multitasking demon in the kitchen. While dinner was cooking I'd have pumpkin chopped and roasting in the oven; a pot of vegetable-scraps-stock: simmering away; enough bread dough mixed for the next week; pepitas toasting in a frying pan and then I'd finish by chopping up some fruit ready to turn into jam.

All very Martha Stewart-esque. All very busy and efficient.

But my poor migraine brain now struggles with multitasking and just thinking about all that busy-ness makes me want to lie down.

So now my cooking is much quieter, simpler and more focused. I try to get the whole meal cooked in just 20 minutes, from standing up to cook, to dinner being ready to eat.

However even though I'm only cooking for 20 minutes, there's almost always a point in the meal making where I'm waiting for something - water to come to the boil, vegetables to be cooked, the frittata to brown under the grill - and so I try to use this morsel of time to do just one extra task.

The other night I was cooking some asparagus, which we had with an omelette. I used a Madhur Jaffrey recipe, where the asparagus is cooked in a Moorish-Spanish sauce, with garlic, cumin, paprika, oregano and some sesame oil. It was easy and quite sensational.

Anyway, before I could start the omelette, the asparagus needed to be cooked to a certain point and I found myself waiting. It was only going to take 2 - 3 minutes and I could have spent that time fiddling with the asparagus, turning it over and fussing, but instead I pulled the small bag of broad beans out the fridge and shelled them.

Just one small task extra, which perfectly fitted in the snippet of available time. It may not seem like much and it's nothing like the multitasking I would have done in the task.

However that bit of extra effort means I have a container of broad beans, partially prepped. Which makes the decision about what to eat today, as well as process of preparing those meals, just a little bit easier.

Are you a cooking multitasker?

Hello, how are you? I've been missing in action for the last few months, taking time off for my health, but now I'm back.

It feels like the right time. Limes & Lycopene has been on hold, as have many aspects of my life, while I hoped, waited and worked on getting better. However my health has not improved as much as I'd wanted.

Dizziness is still an ingredient in my everyday life and there's no foreseeable end to the problem. So, rather than waiting for things to get back to how they were, when my health was tip-top, it's time to strike a new path.

Things have changed for me considerably over the last 18 months, since the vestibular migraines started - I've been writing about my experiences here. I'm now living with a chronic illness which has forced me to resign from clinic, let go of many writing jobs, give up my driving license, slow right down. I have limited energy and limited mental resources, even on a good day.

In all these changes, the way I cook and think about food has also changed. It's had to. I am no longer able to spend the day planning what I'm going to cook that night. I don't have the energy to spend an hour cooking dinner and shopping, of any kind, is a big trigger for my dizziness - so browsing through farmers' markets and beautiful food stores is something I now mostly avoid.

However, it strikes me the problem of how to eat healthily and cook for yourself, when energy, time and motivation are in short supply, is a topic relevant to many. Certainly relevant to more than just the people with vestibular migraine, or even those with a chronic illness.

Like others, I often struggle to summon the motivation for cooking; I get bored with eating the same thing, but don't have the energy for a lot of experimentation; I want delicious flavours but can't be bothered to cook for hours. Plus a late afternoon trip to the shops, to top up on ingredients, is not a good use of my time or energy, so I generally cook with what I have.

It's still a work in progress.

I've missed this space over the last few months, but I've been uncertain about my capabilities and hesitant to commit to blogging again when my energy and health are limited. However, with the help of this site, sent to me by the lovely Elaine, I think I've worked out a sustainable approach.

So I look forward to talking to you all some more over the next few months.

For much of this year I've had some health problems. I've been experiencing daily bouts of dizziness, vertigo, nausea and fatigue.

It's taken a long time to work out what's going on, but now I do have a diagnosis and, most importantly, a plan. It's nothing super serious, or life threatening, but it is something which is going to take time and effort to fully recover from.

At first I was determined to carry on working, but I've come to realise that stubbornness is not always helpful. Soldiering on is not working for me and it's also not fair to my clients and readers.

So I've decided to take some time off work, to focus on my health.

I'm not sure when I'll be back here. However in the meantime, thanks for reading and hanging on during my very intermittent blogging. And I'd like to wish you all a very, very Merry Christmas.

I've spotted some cracking stuff on the internet recently. Many of these links I've posted on Twitter and my Facebook page, but here's a summary of the best articles, recipes and information I've seen.

Honest bread: Great piece from John Birmingham on bread, honesty and supermarkets. The selling of "freshly baked bread" at Coles or Woolies is marketing fluffery. As he says "Sourdough is not an easy bread to bake. You cannot run it up in a couple of hours using industrial mass production methods with semi-skilled labour."

One pot pasta: I am intrigued by this little recipe, pointed out to me by Jude Dodds. The pasta and sauce are cooked in the same pan. I haven't tried it yet, but will do soon, although I'd tweak the recipe, as it's not vegetable heavy enough for me.

Savoury porridge: I've been throughly enjoying savoury versions of porridge recently and I'm now keen to try 101 Cookbooks'Miso Oat Porridge. Lovely flavours and I do like the idea of serving with thinly shaved radish and toasted walnuts.

Making vegetable pickles: Brilliant little guide from Mummy I Can Cook on how to sweet-Asian-pickle anything. It's a recipe template, together with some lovely combinations and ideas.

What have you spotted recently?

I was talking with a friend last week about all the vegetable "tops" you can eat. While she knew about beetroot leaves, she didn't realise you could also eat the greens from swede, carrot, radish, turnips and others.

I'm relatively new to this discovery myself, but love that when you buy any of these vegetables, as long as the leaves are attached, you get _two vegetables for the price of one._

My vegetable box last week contained a plethora of greens. There was lettuce, rocket, coriander and English spinach, plus a bunch each of carrots, radishes and beetroot, all with their leaves attached.

Using vegetable greens

When I get a batch of different greens, I tend to mix them up, using a handful from several bunches in each meal. This gives a complexity of taste and slight variety in texture which I really like. It also softens the stronger and more bitter tasting greens, so those flavours don't dominate.

Sometimes, as the vegetables have not been grown specifically for the greens, they can be a bit worse for wear. pick out and discard any yellowing or slimy leaves.

Before using, give the greens a really good wash, in two changes of water.

My favourite ways to use vegetable green

Quickly steam a large handful of greens and fold these into the middle of an omelette. A few cherry tomatoes and some tangy feta also works well with this.

One of my favourite ways to use vegetable tops is in this Greens with Tahini recipe. I make this all the time and find it immensely satisfying. Last week I had greens with tahini for lunch one day, served on a slice of wholegrain toast.

My back-up recipe for mixed greens is an idea from one of Jamie Oliver's early books. It's flexible, delicious and can be used as a side dish, on toast, or as a meal, topped with some grilled haloumi, cooked chicken or a poached egg.